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Monday, May 04, 2009

Nostalgie de la Boue, Slight Return

For anyone else, the phrase nostalgie de la boue would mean slumming it; for me, it has an almost aspirational air. I exult in, I yearn to fathom the depths, the textures, the tang of these estuarine leavings. Heaney has his bogs, yielding up their hoards of Irish elks and Iron Age human sacrifice victims, and I have my mudbanks, rich in deposits of Asda shopping trolleys and BMXs. Above me hulks the British Extracting Company building, a disused mill. If I were Monet, this colossus on the banks of the Hull would be my Rouen cathedral. I never pass it without contemplating, awe-struck, its huge, redundant majesty. Fossicking around on Google, curious to see what its disused interior might look like, I happened on an account of someone who’d braved the security fence, the wreckage-strewn interior and what sounded like a hair-raising ladder-climb to reach its roof, from which he then photographed the rising sun, suggesting he’d done all of the above in the dark. I salute him for it.

{Ends}

Searching for online evidence again of the innards of the British Extracting Company Building I found this fascinating site, on which enterprising psychogeographers do their bit to reclaim the closed and forbidden landscapes where the concept of place goes to die, in placeless, CCTV-infested, barcoded Britain. Some stunning photographs, I must say.

4 comments:

I have always held a fascination for urban and rural decay,it is indeed a terrible beauty.Good to know that there are other lunatics doing similar.Poteegraf of the Silo (complete with hairy nonsensical outside staircase) my fave.

See the banks of Alph, the sacred river, where huts papered in Coca-Cola adverts and plastic bags abound. See the depths, where corroding bicycle frames lay half buried and appear through the murky water to the observer like macabre spiders of human invention. See the once-virgin sky, littered with blimps, aeroplane tracks and flashing beams of light that burn up from the landscape like scalpels, intent on cutting away the stars. See every face, every body, every corpse and every grave enveloped in the trappings of solipsistic human culture. When the mind's eye draws back from this in horror, there is a web. Entangling and concealing ourselves in language, construction and consumerism; bargain flights, the Starbucks skinny decaf mocha-lattes and flashy sunglasses. The self-interested poem that poses with hands raised in existential anguish towards the heavens, but with its eyes narrowed and slanted towards the audience. Fall back, to the veins of tar and white lines that thread this land and you'll see that Heaney is a fool to cower in the past. Because there's aesthetic charm in every thing to the detached observer and a proper poet. Be it a drop of rain hanging breathlessly on an awning, or a bullet bursting the skin in a flower of scarlet pain, for whatever reason. Or even the glimmer of the sun's rising rays in a pool of tramp's piss.

A terrible beauty has been born.Let's ask Heaney to set his next work in a disused warehouse, or a tip.

I was both fascinated and upset to find that before it was knocked down to build St Stephens shopping arcade the ABC cinema had remained fully furnished but abandoned for twenty years; there were still posters and magazines in the foyer advertising the Timothy Dalton film Licence to Kill.

The other day I saw a discarded can of Carling Black label that must have been decades old. Thrilling.

surreal as a lemon in outer space,ducks quack in a vacuum and Welshtragedy played straight on the face of a red dwarf in the VirgoSupercluster - buster.

Funny as the drop facing A sad manin Iraq, live on TV, go see thatreport back and howl, who's daddynow, bardzo smacked face like assfirm, fondley, full of frank fairflesh - alliterate and make lurve

to your own cool breeze, soul whoflits in infinite bits - osscilateas an impulse of energy in SpankMag Three: The Final Concerto: Cones and Cackhanded Camera Action.

s/he could drip on auto drone, ripped tine-velvet on a moor-stagchained to a thornbush the dawn before its wedding to a doe rayyou twilight of unmeasured art the sidhe move, but will ceasefor the good of world peace